With A Vengeance

(Above: Meet my team for the rest of NCCC! Standing [L-R]: Josh, Team Leader Chloe, Rob, Alicia, Some Guy, Tyler and Alexa. Kneeling [L-R]: Jayme, Alisa, Evelyn and Katherine.)

Dear readers,

I return to you, somewhat weathered and somewhat humbled, after a few weeks of exile. My faithful old companion, my Apple PowerBook G4 laptop, suffered an acute infection of its AC adapter power cord, and nearly expired as a result.

Thankfully, it is returned to life, and so am I, although I’m feeling a bit wary about blogging these days. More on that later. But first... fun things.

Here’s what happened while I was away:

“Sloppy Joe of the Century”

As a rule, I do not attempt to cook things. When I prepare my own meal from scratch, lives get lost. Black smoke fills the kitchen, choking off all sightlines. Boiling cooking oil sprays through the air, maiming limbs and faces alike. Those who survive the initial onslaught never make it past choking down the entrée itself.

But once I was assigned to my new, permanent project team (big shout out to Badger 6!), it was expected that I chip in a dish every now and again for our group dinners. So, I did the honorable thing... and hid every time someone asked, “Who wants to cook?”

Of course, I couldn’t hide forever.

So after preparing a half-decent dish of chocolate pudding for dessert one night, my culinary confidence spiked high enough for me to volunteer for dinner duty. It was Sloppy Joe night. No sweat, right? Just cook up a bunch of meat and slather it on a hamburger bun.

But oh the terror that seized me! I’d never prepared ground beef before, and approached every step of the process with quivering timidity. How hot to set the stove? How to chop the giant slabs of beef? How to stir in the seasonings? And what about those baked beans I’d promised as a side dish?

I’d ask my teammate and cooking assistant Katherine for clues at nearly every turn. Most of the time when I asked her something, she’d just blink and respond with an answer that was so obvious and clear that I felt like smacking my forehead with a spatula. I was letting the pressure get to me.

Somehow, leaping from dish to dish, I got the meal done: crazy amounts of Sloppy Joe, perfectly cooked baked beans, and Katherine’s absurdly delicious potato side dish. Comfort food of the highest order. I haven’t cooked since, of course, but the next time the team calls on me, I’m leaping to the stove with confidence. We’re determined to survive this year of service, and my cooking isn’t going to stand in the way.

“Baby Spike”

Before a NCCC team goes on its first official service road trip (a.k.a. “spike”), it gets a little taste of what it’s like to live and work abroad for an extended time.

This sampling lasts three days, and goes by the affectionate name “baby spike.” For Badger 6’s mini trip, we got to work in a series of Delaware state parks. After all those interminable sessions spent chewing on my pen in classroom lectures, getting outdoors and down to business was a gust of reinvigorating air. Chopping up thorny vines, hefting branches, painting buildings, moving boxes... as mundane as all that might sound, these were the things I signed up to AmeriCorps to do. Not bureaucratic paperwork. Not reliving my collegiate doldrums. Work. Labor. Sweat.

And when the toils of the day were through, our team retired to our spectacular lodgings for an evening of hijinks. Our sponsors had posted us up at an eccentric old manor house in the woods near the University of Delaware. Known as the Krapf House (the “f” is not silent, I have learned), the place was a sprawling maze of rooms and funky architecture. A grand window in the kitchen gave us a prime view of a forest creek outside. Ornate wallpaper and carpeted bathrooms suggested a house that had enjoyed a past life as an aristocratic retreat.

But the highlight of the journey was getting to know my teammates. I’m not going to lie: our first week together had been awkward. We were all still attached to our original groups, which we had come to love during our first week in NCCC. After all the team rosters got scrambled, there were a lot of guarded looks and stifled laughter. But, man, three days working together goes a long way.

I discovered that it’s a goofy, loose group of kids that I’m a part of. We sang rounds of “Frere Jacques” in the van and during physical training, slammed the heels of our steel-toed boots against walls and trees, beatboxed circles around each other, discovered our spirit animals, and laughed until we were out of breath. It’s going to be a good year, I can already tell. Definitely not a normal one.

“This Blog Has Been Compromised”

I suppose it was naïve to assume that only my friends and family would read this blog. This is the Internet, after all. Any information that you are foolhardy enough to post here becomes public knowledge the moment you click “send.” Hell, I tried to hide this blog from my dad, but all he had to do was search Yahoo for my name plus the word “blog,” and... voila.

So on some deeper level, I was not shocked when the AmeriCorps NCCC Atlantic Region director called me into her office to talk to me about my blog. But in that primal, “fight or flight” part of my brain? Sheer panic. SHE KNOWS! BURN THE EVIDENCE, JEREMY!

But, too late. She prefaced all of our talk by saying that she wasn’t angry with me. Still... someone at AmeriCorps HQ had discovered the bizarro world of NCCC’d via Google Alerts. This person made good note of choice words such as “dysfunctional,” “apeshit,” and others before passing on a memo to our regional director.

I think it would be somewhat disingenuous of me to repeat any substantial amount of our conversation, or the second talk I had afterward with my unit leader. But, yes... those conversations happened, and yes, they upset me.

The regional and unit directors said all the right things: they weren’t angry about anything I wrote. There would be no censorship, no deletion of blog posts, no black smudge on my AmeriCorps record, no “A Clockwork Orange”-style reeducation sessions. As they put it, they just wanted to make sure I was informed of what was going on at the top end of the food chain. The unit director warmly encouraged me to keep writing, saying he had enjoyed the bulk of what I'd posted.

Still, my emotional reactions to getting pulled aside from the group for these talks got pretty extreme. First, I beat up on myself with brass knuckles. I think we’ve all had that moment where we have “stupidstupidstupidstupidstupid...” running through our heads. This was my moment.

But in the following days, frustration curdled to anger. I seriously considered closing up this blog, or turning it into an invitation-only newsletter. Perhaps it was a good thing that my laptop was incapacitated during this time, as I might have posted something I would later have regretted. Hopefully, those raging coals have now cooled off and given me a clear-eyed view of the situation.

So I want to make one thing clear, for the record: I left a good job in journalism for the sole reason of joining AmeriCorps. I absolutely believe the work we do here is of the utmost importance and value. Anything I write or have written is a product of my belief that AmeriCorps is a great program, and should be a great program, now and in the future.

But I have no intention of turning this blog into a fuzzy, public relations arm for the organization. When something stinks, I’m going to write about it. I have the assurances of leadership here that I am fully free to express my opinion on this little Web outpost (as it should be!). So I’m taking them up on that promise. If the content of this blog is ever infringed upon via a threat, a heavy-handed suggestion, supplemental discipline, supervised editing, addition or deletion, you will all be made aware of that.

None of the above has happened so far, and I expect that nothing of the sort will happen in the future.

This is also the last mention I will make of this incident on NCCC’d. I’ve wasted enough emotional energy on it already. I intend to have an amazing year, to discover new things and to “get things done for America,” as our organization’s motto so boldly states.

I’m not about to let a speed bump derail a bullet train.